3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) has introduced LTE (Long Term Evolution) into the Release 8 version of UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) standards. With LTE, the UMTS air interface is further optimized for packet data transmission by improving the system capacity and the spectral efficiency.
A current topic in the 3GPP standardization fora is the further advancement of LTE (Long Term Evolution) into the Release 10 version of UMTS standards in terms of spectral efficiency, cell edge throughput, coverage and latency, also referred to as LTE-Advanced. One of the key characteristics of LTE-Advanced is the support of bandwidths >20 MHz and up to 100 MHz by spectrum aggregation, i.e. the bandwidth of an LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) radio cell is divided into a number of so-called component carriers (CC), wherein the bandwidth size of each component carrier is limited to a maximum of 20 MHz. Efficient methods for radio resource allocation for data communication, such as component carrier allocation for mobile terminals, are desirable.